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Sunday, September 20, 2009

Score Truck

(Pictured: Score Truck w/ Hideki Matsui & Derek Jeter)

Over at Bronx Banter, Hank Waddles started a revolution by mistake. In one of his posts, he inadvertently misspelled a word while commenting on measuring the team's ability to score. Some of the eagle-eyed (and sarcastic) followers picked up on this mistake, turning the phrase "Score Truck" into a running gag for when the Yankees scored a boatload of runs in one inning; something that they seemed to have been doing a lot of since the All-Star break. Soon it evolved into a rally cry; whenever the Yankees fell behind in a game, someone would comment about hoping the Score Truck would make a delivery, and more often than not it would. It has now become a permanent member of the Bronx Banter lexicon.

Since Hank recently confirmed he is the genius who originated the Score Truck, I felt it would be nice to utilize my art skills to offer a tribute to his amazing contribution to the Banter community. Hopefully, the phrase will make it's way out of the blogsphere and into the real world; perhaps a homemade t-shirt or a banner that pops up during a YES gamecast. It would be even better if the phrase were to be uttered by one of any number of players or sportscasters during or after a game; this would be a fitting tribute to the genius that evolves from the Banter.

I do think big.

At any rate, here's my tribute to Hank Waddles' Score Truck, the latest sensation of and from Bronx banter. Oh, and if any Banter members want to clear up the story of it's origin, please feel free to leave a comment. Enjoy! >;)

10 comments:

That illustration is just about the sweetest thing I've ever seen. Here's the full story.

In a game out in Anaheim, Derek Jeter inexplicably dropped a pop-up which eventually led to a couple unearned runs. I was describing the play in a comment on the recap post, and here's what I said:

The A-Rod error certainly opened things up and got the Angels back in the game, but for me the key moment was Jeter’s error. (Sure, you should expect Bruney to pick him up and get the next couple guys, but at this point can you really EXPECT Bruney to get crucial outs?) Anyway, after Jeter dropped that pop-up, I saw something that I’ve never seen before. He seriously looked like he was going to vomit in the middle of the field. Say what you will about his fielding deficiencies, but this was so routine that the Angels announcer announced it as an out and the operator in the score truck changed the graphic from 1 Out to 2 Outs — both before noticing that the ball was rolling at Jeter’s feet. A few minutes later a 7-6 game became 10-6. Again the cameras flash to Jeter, and Captain Clutch looked ill. This was Tiger missing a six-inch putt for par. This was Jordan pounding a dunk off the back of the rim. In short, this was the Angels.

After posting, I read the comment I realized that I had made up the Score Truck term. Still have no idea why.

That's great; honestly I would have never noticed, and I'll bet the casual lurker wouldn't have suspected a thing. I wonder who else noticed it immediately and got the ball rolling. I know several who would have played with it all night.

Score Truck to me is up there with "HA!" as the top Banter rally cry, but with much humbler beginnings which makes it more endearing.

If you go to this recap post (one of Emma's), you'll see that Just Fair, Horace Clark Era, and PJ were the next users of the "score truck", and RIYank is the first one to speculate on it without mentioning it by name.

In the beginning, no one mentioned the Score Truck more than monkeypants (9 times those first two days) and thealarmis (6 times) (no one else topped two, though cult of basebaal gets my vote for best early use, asking (I paraphrase) why the score truck couldn't run over the Rally Monkey).

But if there was a game thread, the Score Truck showed up: 12 times on July 18th, 16 times on July 20th. Through the 20th, monkeypants and thealarmis both had 14 score truck mentions, and ms october was next with 8.